


Art Project

by strictlyNocturnal



Series: Delete Save File [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Sburb, Suicide, Therapy, Trauma, actually probably just more affected, also daverezi i guess, dave is maybe more messed up than jade, even though i dont like daverezi wtf, idk what this au is basically its pain and im sorry, implied johndave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 05:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1417129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strictlyNocturnal/pseuds/strictlyNocturnal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Basically: an au where the kids have the option to restart in a universe where sburb never existed, but they've also never met. That's sad and all, but it's for the greater good! (plus, it's not like they'll remember.)</p><p>You don’t have any friends.</p><p>Except the ones in your dreams, of course, but they’re all dead anyway, they’ve been dead for a long time and you’re never going to see them again dead or alive because they aren’t real anyway they aren’t real Dave those are just dreams, nightmares, some kids get night terrors it’s perfectly normal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Art Project

When you are ten, you cough up blood in your sleep.

No you don’t.

When you are eleven, your skin bubbles like boiled wax.

No it doesn’t.

When you are twelve, you are killed by a man with the head of a wolf.

No you aren’t.

When you are thirteen, your throat is slit in a deep, long cut that leaves you coughing and choking for days.

No it isn’t, but you still can’t look at one of your brother’s shitty swords without gagging.

When you enter school at the age of six, you are sent to the guidance counselor’s office because you were drawing a picture of your dead brother during free time.

You are adamant in that your brother has a sword through his chest, and even when the school calls bro and has him come talk to you you won’t relent, pushing his shirt up to his armpits and gesturing wildly at the small, thin scar and yelling at them to look, they see, they see!

Bro gently removes you and sits you back down in the chair and repeats calmly and quietly that that is from an operation he had when he was your age and it was not because there was ever a sword through his chest.

You take a day off of school and when you come back you are forced to attend “emotional enrichment” sessions every morning. “Emotional enrichment” sounds kind of nice on its own, but you know what the other kids say. There’s crazy Dave with his sunglasses inside and his weird white hair. Did you know he has to go to the school shrink? I heard he attacked a teacher, did you know his eyes are the color of blood?

You don’t have any friends.

Except the ones in your dreams, of course, but they’re all dead anyway, they’ve been dead for a long time and you’re never going to see them again dead or alive because they aren’t real anyway they aren’t real Dave those are just dreams, nightmares, some kids get night terrors it’s perfectly normal.

That’s what the man in “emotional enrichment” says.

When you’re in fourth grade you ask if you can just start calling “emotional enrichment” therapy because everyone knows that’s what it is. Your “enrichment counselor” a man called Doctor Scratch, says that we don’t need to label this as anything Dave, but if that makes you feel better, then fine.

That same night you wake up choking and grabbing at your neck trying to feel the cut because it is there and it was there and it

Isn’t there any more. You’re perfectly all right.

You lay awake for the rest of the night, trembling.

All of the dreams are bad but that’s one of the worst, both because the actual way you die is the worst and leaves you choking and coughing involuntarily days after and because in that dream you can see a face, the face of a girl whose words come in teal and whose eyes are solid red and whose skin is pure grey.

You love her, you think. Loved. Past tense.

Or, if there was a tense for never, then that one, because she’s not real.

You know she’s not real. Between Doc Scratch and Bro and the kids at school and common fucking sense, you’ve always known, really. But it still hurts just the same, just like how it still makes your days less lonely.

Plus, you aren’t even in middle school yet, and though you’ve never been one of the mind that girls have cooties (if you were one of that mind then boys would have cooties too, because people in general aren’t really your thing when all they do is call you names) you aren’t really sure what’s meant by the word “love.”

Well, not until you meet Teresa Pyron.

You see her for the first time when you’re in middle school and she’s in your art class, which confuses and fascinates you because she’s blind and how could a blind girl make such beautiful pictures?

Halfway through seventh grade there’s a project where everyone is forced to partner up with someone and each pair draws eachother’s portraits and you happen to be sitting next to Teresa because of alphabetical order (no one’s last name starts with a q and there are no ts in your art class) so you’re paired with her.

You spend two weeks on the portraits and vow not to show them to eachother until you’re done. You know Teresa prefers things with lots of colors- you think she has some weird form of synesthesia or something- so you abandon your usual black and white with colored accents and make her freckled skin teal-tinted gray, her cloudy eyes solid red, her auburn hair licorice black with candy corn horns protruding out of it.

You aren’t sure why except for that it’s how she looks in your dreams.

Wait, that’s wrong. It’s how the imaginary alien girl that bears some coincidental resemblance to Teresa Pyron looks in your dreams.

She loves the drawing, gives it a deep inhale and cackles that it smells like cherry-berry licorice and is that a hint of pumpkin? And your teacher says that Dave that’s really creative how you changed the colors like that and gives you an A.

But your picture is nothing in comparison to Teresa’s, where you’re all cherry vanilla in a licorice suit in a city of grape bubblegum purple, which you’ve

Seen

Before

You ask Teresa if you can keep the picture and she says yes.

You and her are friends after that, and you start drawing because she says you’re good. Honestly, if Teresa told you that you were good at flying, you’d probably go jump off a bridge, because try as you might to stop it, you’re in love with the blind girl who says that red tastes like cherries instead of that cherries are red.

Everything seems like it’s going to get better. You start hanging out with Teresa and her friend Sol who doesn’t seem to like you too much but Teresa says he does, just doesn’t show it. You three go out to lunch, get ice cream, you get some on your cheek and Teresa licks it off and then laughs for thirty minutes when your face “smells like cherries.” Yeah, you’re friends. People still call you names but now the creepy pale dude hangs out with the creepy blind girl and the brooding computer nerd who once decked some really big football douchebag in the face and knocked out half his teeth and the bullies’ wariness of your friends outweighs their hatred for you by about a ton. The dreams haven’t been hitting too hard lately. Maybe you’ll get through this, maybe everything’s finally looking up.

Then you wake up in a cold sweat and Terezi Pyrope has killed her best friend and then you yourself have died being ripped to shreds.

Being squeezed to nothing.

Bleeding out.

You’ve never had three deaths in one night before and you have to tumble out of bed because the sheets are strangling you and then you have to run downstairs because the floor is going to suck you into one of the cracks and you’re going to die between the walls and Bro won’t know until days later when the whole apartment smells of carrion and your face has been torn away by crows

You sit on the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor because there’s no cracks in there to suck you up and you shake and cry and you’re not even really there but the fear is and the pain is and the shame is and you cant BREATHE

When Bro finds you at 5am on his way to make coffee, you’ve vomited all over yourself and the floor and you don’t seem to care because it’s like you can’t even see.

Oh god little dude you could have came and woken me up you know that you know it’s fine no matter what and he’s panicking now but you’re just staring straight ahead covered in snot and puke and tears.

You don’t go to school for the rest of the week, four days. Teresa texts you six times and Sol texts you four and you don’t respond to any of them because you don’t deserve people like them if you can’t even keep hold of yourself. You’re weak and sad and weak and stupid and weak and you don’t want this to keep going this way you don’t want this to be how your life is.

Doctor Scratch recommends you seek help from someone more experienced than a school therapist and now your sessions are 45 minutes away three times a month two hundred dollars each.

It doesn’t help.

Nothing helps.

You’re taking pills for anxiety and schizophrenia and sleeping pills every night and mood stabilizers too which are really antipsychotics but you have to call them mood stabilizers because if the kids at school got wind of ~~anti~~ psycho ~~tics~~ Teresa probably wouldn’t scare them away any more.

You probably don’t even have half the shit they’re dosing you for but “in an alternate dimension I died a thousand deaths and now I don’t even have my friends from then to help me” isn’t really a diagnosis (and it’s certainly not true, anyway.)

You’re fifteen and you don’t feel anything except fear that suddenly you’re going to find that this is the dream and that’s real and sometimes you sit on your bedroom floor thinking in circles like this until you’re exhausted.

Sometimes when you’re home alone, when no one’s online, when you can’t think of anything to draw, not even shitty comics, and you feel like the only person in the universe, you drag a blade along your wrist because then at least you’ll feel something, at least something will be definitively real (except in your dreams the cuts aren’t usually there and it starts the whole thing all over again.)

You know the blades are the biggest goddamn cliché of them all and the kids at school prove it when they corner you in the bathroom and slam you against the wall and somehow one of your sleeves slips up to reveal the skin of your arm patterned with red lines in various states of freshness and one of them grabs the pail flesh and hollers and when they’re done with you your shades are snapped and bruises are blossoming all over your alabaster skin and your shirt is stained black with a sharpie: “emo” it reads, “psycho” “going to die” “attention whore.”

And they’ve ripped your sleeves off at the shoulders and now your cuts are out in the open for all to see and when Sol finds you there at the end of the day when he comes in to do his hair you’re huddled under the sink with your arms firmly crossed over your chest and when he tugs you out he sees everything and

Oh

He leaves you there as he gets Teresa and gives you his jacket to wear and they walk you home in silence.

Now your friends know how messed up you are.

The next week your brother puts you in a group home because it’s the best for everyone Dave I’m sorry we have to do this but you know it’s true, and you spend the first two weeks in the group home alone in your room doing nothing and talking to no one.

You start mixing music because one of the computers has a pretty cool program for that sort of thing and that’s how you spend your time there and your friends come to visit every other weekend.

Bro comes to visit every other weekend.

Your friends come to visit hardly ever (they actually come fairly often at the beginning but you’re always either asleep or in therapy or refusing to leave your room so after a while they stop coming.)

You don’t blame them.

You don’t get out of the group home until summer and nothing’s better but you seem to have managed to fool them into thinking it is and you get an internship at the local radio station when you turn 16.

You don’t see ~~sollux~~ Sol or ~~terezi~~ Teresa until you’re back in school, though you do see their counterparts in your dreams.

Dead, usually.

You see others too, grey text and green text and purple text and blue text and you miss them so much that it gets to the point where you can see someone wearing a shirt with the cancer zodiac symbol on it and find the word “karkat” forming on your lips before you even know why, you can see a boy in a blue hoodie and feel so sad and empty because you were friends once, you were a family once, you were in love once!

You find yourself wasting pads upon pads of paper trying to capture blue eyes and black hair and buck teeth and realizing that Terezi wasn’t the only one you loved.

But no, you don’t miss them, you can’t miss them! You can’t, Dave! We go through this every time and you still have these feelings!

They!

Aren’t!

Real! Why do you think they are?

The therapy sessions haven’t been helping much.

Teresa kisses you the first time you see her again, and the next time she tries to talk to you you don’t respond and it’s the same the next time and the time after that and soon enough they stop trying.

You always seem to be away, in the clouds with a blue-clad boy and laughter on your lips even though those same lips have tasted blood so many times.

You graduate highschool with mediocre grades and pain in your throat.

You keep having the dreams. The week you decide not to go to college, you die three times. The night before your first job as a real life DJ, you die two more and when you’re actually onstage for the you feel like you’re going to die you’re going to choke something is ripping your lungs out through your chest and replacing them with nothing.

But really you’re fine and they ask you back again the next week and soon it’s an actual job and it’s enough to live on so you move out.

That’s when you’re eighteen.

When you’re 23 and working at a bar on the days you’re not playing music for a crowd, you find a book.

Someone must have dropped it because it’s on the floor just under the bar and slightly squashed by a bag or a foot.

You pick it up because you’re cleaning and you look at it because you’re interested and you take it home and start reading because why the hell not? It’s just a cheap paperback; it’s not like someone’s going to come back for it.

It’s by R. Lalonde, and R. Lalonde types in purple text.

No she doesn’t, the text of the book is plain black, normal, and you don’t know why you thought that until you see her picture on the inside of the back cover and then you scream and look up her name quicker than you can even finish the first chapter.

She’s dead.

Beloved young author R. Lalonde died this week at 22 of what is thought to be alcohol poisoning.

The article is dated November of the previous year.

R. Lalonde writes about grey-skinned people with candy corn horns who were vampires and spiders and cats and could taste colors and build robots and R. Lalonde wrote about a boy who could harness the wind and R. Lalonde wrote about a girl who inhaled shadow and came back glowing and R. Lalonde wrote about a girl with dog ears who was ready to kill her friends and R. Lalonde wrote about

a boy

With a broken sword

Who died a thousand deaths.

But now she’s dead.

If only you had gotten here earlier if only you had known.

You turn off your computer and then for good measure you smash it with one of the katanas that came with you from Bro’s not-so-shitty apartment when you moved here.

The sword breaks cleanly in two as it hits the screen.

You take the part of the blade attached to the handle and be the boy with the broken sword.

The blood you choke on is real, this time, and there’s no false reality to wake you.

**Author's Note:**

> Blugh this is a weird style of writing but I like it a lot?? its fun even though im writing bout death  
> This has actually been done for about a week but I had to edit and add some bits (the johndave-y bits whOOPS)  
> Please tell me if you notice any glaring errors!  
> The first draft of the Rose oneshot for this au is about halfway written and then I have a very very rough idea for the John one aahah stay tuned i guess


End file.
